Thanks for a great semester, and have a great new year

Folks, this will very likely be the last time I teach LIS 201 for quite awhile.  This was an unusual and experimental course that I developed just around the time that I earned tenure here at UW, and frankly I didn't know if students would find it either interesting or useful.  Seven years and over 1,000 students later, I think I have my answer.  It has been a great highlight of my career to watch each class of new participants encounter this material from their own ever-changing historical perspectives.  (This class is about as old as Twitter is, for example.)

Going forward, you're all going to continue to build the "information society" yourselves with every economic, democratic, community, and career choice you make over the course of your lives.  I hope our brief time together has helped you to better understand the impact of those choices, and inspired  you to similarly help to empower others to more fully participate in shaping our networked world of ideas.

All the best, GREG

This week (and next week) in LIS 201

Week 15: Student presentations

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 09

• Each TA will submit one student presentation for screening before the whole course. You may bring snacks if you like.
• Last fifteen minutes: Fill out overall course evaluation (professor leaves room).

HOMEWORK BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Work on your multimedia book review and bring your questions to section.
• If problems with your slide show were discovered when screened by your TA, fix them and repost.   You must have a working slide show to receive credit for the assignment.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• Workshop for the final analytic, multimedia book review.
• Last ten minutes: Fill out discussion section evaluations (TA leaves room).
• Graded exam #2 handed back to students.

---

Final Exam Week

There is no final exam for this course.

Your multimedia book review is due on the last weekday of finals week: Friday, December 19, by 5pm. Post the link to your book review blog to your discussion section wiki (and you may want to email it to your TA as well, just to make sure). Make it serious, and make it look good. No late book reviews will be accepted.

Have a good winter break!

This week in LIS 201

Week 14: SECOND MIDTERM EXAM

EXAM ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 02

READINGS BEFORE DISCUSSION

• None.  (Not yet, anyway.)

HOMEWORK BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Begin work on your multimedia book review.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• Continue to screen the remainder of the slideshow presentations and discuss them.
• Discuss strategies for multimedia book review project.
• Graded paper #2 handed back to students.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

For your last online activity, you will reflect on your own online experience in this course.

• The "hybrid" or "blended" course approach of LIS 201 -- combining in-person lecture, in-person discussion section, and online activity and writing -- is an increasingly popular mode of educational delivery in higher education. Do a web search and see if you can find a few other examples of hybrid/blended courses, either at UW-Madison or at other universities. How do these examples differ from our approach in LIS 201?
• Think about your own experience with this course. For example: Did the online portions connect with the in-person portions? Did you feel that you were a more effective student in the physical world or the virtual world? Were you able to learn more about your fellow students from online or offline (face-to-face) interactions? Do you feel more comfortable now with online resources like blogs and wikis than you did before taking this course? Should UW instructors increase their use of online components in courses, or should we proceed with greater caution?
• Finally, think about the substantive material from the lectures and readings on the information society that you've worked with all semester long. Did the course lectures and readings bring a better perspective to your own online experiences, both in this course and in your personal life? Or another way of thinking about it: would online course components work differently in a course that wasn't all about the online world of information?
• Write up your findings and your reactions on your discussion section weblog. Be honest, it's OK.
• Comment on at least one other student's posting.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201

Week 12: Sustainable information infrastructure

LECTURE TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18

• We'll consider the global environmental impact of the information society, and watch a bit of the Frontline documentary episode "Digital Dumping Ground".

READINGS BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Rebecca Slayton, “Efficient, secure green: Digital utopianism and the challenge of making the electrical grid ‘smart,’” Information & Culture 48:4 (2013).
• Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the trash: On the future of new media,” in Charles R. Acland, ed., Residual Media (2007).

HOMEWORK BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Post your five-minute slideshow presentation to your personal wiki page. This must be a working presentation; in other words, once your TA downloads it and clicks on it, it should open up and play with both images and narration.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• You will begin to screen the slideshow presentations and talk about them.
• Your TA will save some time at the end of class to discuss the upcoming second midterm.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you will review and revise your previous blog postings to think about the online "voice" that you have developed over the course of this semester, and how that differs from the voice you construct for yourself through written and print materials.

• Go back through your discussion section blog and copy out every single entry you have posted for these weekly online assignments all semester long, pasting them all into a single word processing document, one by one, with the title and date indicated for each entry.   (You don't have to include the comments you left on other students' blog posts -- just your own main blog posts.)  
• Then go through and proofread this big compendium of blog posts.   Check all of your spelling and grammar.   Make sure you have written in complete sentences all the way through.   Add paragraph breaks if appropriate.   And make sure you have correctly spelled/identified any authors' names you have reference.  Your goal is ZERO MISTAKES.
• Format this blog post compendium document as a regular writing assignment -- with 12-point Times  or Times Roman font, one-inch margins, and double spacing -- and print it out so you can hand it in to your TA at the next discussion section.   You will want to read over it one more time in printed form, because you will probably catch some last-minute typos if you do.   
• Finally, write a NEW blog post back on your discussion section blog discussing how you have presented yourself through your online writing in the class so far, and whether that is the same way that you present yourself in other aspects of your scholarly career in LIS 201 (eg. in person in discussion section, through your formal written assignments, and/or through your work on exams).   Which of your self-presentations is the most "true" or the most effective?   Which showcases your talents the best? 

This week in LIS 201 (week 11)

Week 11: Games, simulations, and avatars

LECTURE TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

• Video games

READINGS BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Stephen Kline et al., “The new cyber-city: The interactive game industry in the new millennium,” Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (2003).
• Carlo Rotella, “No child left untableted,” New York Times (12 September 2013).

HOMEWORK BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your turn to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Upload a working "skeleton file" of your slideshow presentation to your discussion section wiki, and make a link to your personal wiki page. This should be a PowerPoint file that has all the timings correct for the Ignite presentation, with 15-second auto-advance of the slides.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (# 17 and #18) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).  These should be the last article speeches of the semester.
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Discuss your book slideshow project.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This weekend you'll participate in an augmented reality game.  For this exercise, you should team up with from one to three other students in your discussion section.  At least one student in each team needs to have an iOS device (an Apple iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad).    

• Read through the Aris web site at http://arisgames.org and learn about this augmented reality tool.
• Download the Aris app from the iOS app store at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aris/id371788434
• Use the app to create an ARIS account and login to the game server.
• Pick one of the available games from the "Location Specific" category (these involve our campus and city).
• Play!
• Blog about your experience playing this sort of game.  (Each group may create a single jointly-authored blog post.)
• (Inspired to create your own augmented reality game?  I'm willing to consider extra credit if you do; let me know.)

This week in LIS 201 (week 10)

Week 10: Information labor and digital divides

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 04 

• Apple, Foxconn, and controversy over different meanings of work and the varying conditions for different information workers across the globe. 

READINGS BEFORE DISCUSSION

• David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, “The political economy of work and health in silicon valley,” in The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (2002).
• Michael Spence, “Information technology and the integration of the global economy,” in The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (2011).

HOMEWORK BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your turn to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Finish your final draft of paper #2!

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#15 and #16) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Turn in printed final version of paper #2.
• Discuss your final multimedia project ("skeleton" file for Ignite presentation due on wiki next week)

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This weekend you will explore the presence of casualized labor on the Interent -- and in real communities.

• Manpower Inc. is the world's largest temporary employment firm: "Manpower's worldwide network of 4,500 offices in 80 countries and territories enables the company to meet the needs of its 400,000 clients per year, including small and medium size enterprises in all industry sectors, as well as the world's largest multinational corporations." Explore their web site a bit to get a sense of what this firm does. (They even have a branch on Second Life ...)
• Now go to the US site for Manpower and do a job search in three different areas: (1) Madison, WI; (2) your hometown (or the city closest to your hometown); (2) a town or city you might like to someday live in.
• (Hint: Leave the "Keyword(s)" field on the search page empty, but choose a specific state from the drop-down menu, click on a specific town in the "locations" list, and then click the ">" button to move that town into the search box. Finally, click "Search.")
• What kind of technology skills do these jobs demand? How many temporary vs. permanent jobs are listed? Do these look like good jobs to you?
• Write up a report of your findings, comparing the three places you investigated, for your discussion section blog.
• Comment on at least one other student's posting.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 09)

Week 09: Social networking and online immersion

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28 

• Film: Disconnected (2008) 

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Ramesh Srinivasan, "Bridges between cultural and digital worlds in Revolutionary Egypt," The Information Society 29 (2013), 49-60.
• S. Craig Watkins, "The very well connected: Friending, bonding, and community in the digital age," The Young and the Digital (2009).  

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your turn to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Complete your peer reviews of your fellow students' paper #2 drafts on their pages of the discussion section wiki.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#13 and #14)on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Discuss paper #2 revision strategies.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week's challenge will be especially difficult. Get ready.

• Attempt to survive without using any personal digital social networking tools for the whole weekend, Friday 5pm to Sunday 5pm. Do not consult or post to Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn or Google+ or whatever else it is that young people these days use for social networking.  Do not Tweet. Do not text. Do not instant-message. Do not Skype. Do not iChat. Do not answer personal emails (or even read them, if you can avoid it). And, yes, do not use your cell phone at all (although you may use a land-line phone or a pay phone). The only thing you are allowed to do is the minimum necessary online participation for other classes you are taking.
• Once the weekend is over (or once you've thrown in the towel if you don't make it to Sunday at 5pm), write about the experience on your discussion section blog. How do you end up communicating with people? How do you coordinate meetings with your friends? How do you survive without taking a Quiz On Your Favorite Star Wars Lego Mini-Figure every hour?
• Comment on at least one other student's write-up.
• Be thankful you weren't a college student before the early 1990s, like I was, when THERE WAS NO WORLD WIDE WEB! (Gasp!)
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

More LIS 201 extra credit opportunities

LIS 201 students: Here are three more opportunities for extra credit.  Each of these is worth 0.5 points.  You may choose to do all three, or two, or one, or none.  It is extra credit, so it is not required.

(1) Attend a Go Big Read event (see http://www.gobigread.wisc.edu).  There are lots of different events you could choose.  Document your attendance somehow and forward that documentation to your  TA.  And then post a substantive summary of and reflection on the event to your discussion section blog.

(2) Attend a 2-hour or longer Software Training for Students workshop before the end of the semester (see https://sts.doit.wisc.edu).  Document your attendance somehow and forward that documentation to your  TA.  And then post a substantive summary of and reflection on the training to your discussion section blog.

(3) Attend a 30-minute or longer tutoring session with a student mentor at the Writing Center before the end of the semester (see http://www.writing.wisc.edu).  Ideally this one should focus on your writing assignment #2, although if you attend a session for a writing assignment for a different class, I will count that too.  Document your attendance somehow and forward that documentation to your  TA.  And then email your TA with a brief summary of whether you found the tutoring section useful and what changes you made to your writing assignment as a result.

Again, each of these is worth 0.5 points.  Cheers, GREG

This week in LIS 201 (week 08)

Week 08: Big data and social surveillance

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21

• Beyond Google

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Tarleton Gillespie, “The relevance of algorithms,” in T. Gillespie et al. eds., Media Technologies (2014).
• David Lyon, “Surveillance, power, and everyday life,” in R. Mansell et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies (2007).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your turn to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Post your rough draft of paper #2 to your personal wiki pages (you will want to create a separate page so that your peer reviewers can just "comment" at the bottom).

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#11 and #12) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week, you will discover how much information you can find out about yourself online.

• First, do a geodemographic marketing analysis on yourself, by searching online for data about the place where you live which someone might ascribe to you. Here are some sites to start with: 
• http://www.whitepages.com/reverse_phone (enter your phone)
• http://factfinder.census.gov/ (enter your zip code)
• http://accessdane.co.dane.wi.us/ (enter your address)
• http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/ (find your hometown and explore income, education, other demographics)
• Next, do a social networking analysis on yourself, by searching for online data specifically about you on various social networking services that you might use  -- Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Make sure you are not logged in to those services in order to see what an outside visitor would see (you might want to try searching your Facebook identity from a public computer, for example).
• Now do a general Google search, first using your name in different combinations ("Greg Downey," "Downey, Greg," "G Downey," etc.), then using your email address, and finally using your telephone number.
• Can you think of any other sites to search for which might provide either individual or aggregate data to help flesh out your "digital puppet"?
• When you are finished searching these sites, create a new post on your discusion section blog describing the person that a geodemographic firm would see when they look for "you". What do you think about this representation of your existence?
• Comment on at least one other student's posting for this assignment.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 07)

Week 07: Cyberspace and hypermedia

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14

• Films: The Machine is (Changing) Us (Michael Wesch; 2009) and Revolution in Cairo (Frontline; 2011). 

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Henry Jenkins et al., “Where Web 2.0 went wrong,” Spreadable Media (2013).
• Robert McChesney, “How can the political economy of communication help us understand the Internet?” in Digital Disconnect (2013).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#9 and #10) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Discuss tasks and strategies for writing assignment #2. (Rough draft due on wiki by start of next week's discussion.)
• Graded paper #1 handed back.
• Graded midterm #1 handed back.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week we'll explore a famous article by scientist, engineer, and wartime government administrator Vannevar Bush on hyperlinked media that many cite as an inspiration for today's World Wide Web.

• Read Bush's 1945 article entitled "As we may think," where he describes his vision of an information infrastructure he called the "Memex."
• Twenty years later, in 1967, Bush wrote a follow up article, "Memex revisited," which recast his ideas in light of the early computer revolution. Read this revised version and think about the differences from the 1945 version.
• About thirty years after this, in 1995, a symposium was held at MIT to consider Bush's Memex ideas fifty years after their original publication. (Remember, this was only a few years after the World Wide Web had appeared on the media stage.) Many of the attendees were well-known pioneers in the area of hypertext research, like Douglas Englebart (inventor of the computer mouse), Ted Nelson (author of the 1970s counterculture computer manifesto "Computer Lib!") and Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the protocols that underlie the World Wide Web itself). Read this description of their reactions to the original Vannevar Bush article.
• Finally, perform a Google search on "Memex" to find an intriguing commentary (news article, scholarly article, blog post, cartoon, video, whatever) on this subject.  ("Intriguing" here could mean that you find it very insightful or that you find it entirely uninformed.)  Then go to your discussion section blog and write a new post reacting to that commentary.  Include a link to the original commentary.  Make sure your commentary is constructive and civil, because the original author may notice and want to reply!
• Read and reply to at least one other student's blog posting.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 06)

Week 06: FIRST MIDTERM EXAM

EXAM ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 07

Our in-class midterm exam will be held in the normal lecture hall. Please arrive a bit early so we can start on time.

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

This week's reading relates to your software training session and your multimedia assignment, not your exam.

• Garr Reynolds, "Presentation tips," http://www.garrreynolds.com/preso-tips/ (2013). 

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

None.

DISCUSSION MEETING

Attend software training sessions, not your regular discussion.  Rather than hold your normal discussion section, all students will attend software training sessions scheduled in various computer labs around campus, during your normal discussion section time. You will receive customized training on PowerPoint presentation software that you may use for your multimedia project. This training is offered courtesy of the DoIT Software Training for Students program.

For sections meeting Wednesday, October 8th:Location: 150 Animal Sciences
Time: During your regularly-scheduled section time 

For sections meeting Thursday, October 9th:Location: 150 Animal Sciences
Time: During your regularly-scheduled section time 

For sections meeting Friday, October 10th:Location: 150 Animal Sciences
Time: During your regularly-scheduled section time

You should feel free to bring your own laptops if you have your own copy of PowerPoint. 

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week your online activity will involve the selection of the book that you are going to read and review.  Each student in your discussion section must choose a different book to read, so if you fear someone else will pick the same book as you, finish this assignment early!  And as a final challenge, the book must have been published in the last two years  --”  which narrows the field of candidates considerably!

• Think about some search terms or phrases which might quickly and effectively lead you to interesting books on "the information society." Will using the term "information" suffice? What will using the search term "information society" leave out? Be creative.
• Using an online bookstore like Amazon.com, do a search for a book related to the information society that you would like to read. (We are starting in an online book store in order to make sure that the book is still in print.) Narrow your choice down to three candidates that have been published within the last two years. Which book has the most pages? Which costs the most? Which has the best reviews?
• Once you have found three possible books, look each of them up through the public web interface of WorldCat. This is a meta-catalog of all US public and university library catalogs. Which book is held by more libraries? What are the subject classifications of each book? Do they differ? Do they suggest further, more interesting search terms? (You may want to go back to step #2 with these terms.)
• Look each book up on Google Books. Which book seems to have generated the most chatter on the Web? Which has more reviews available through Google? Are any of them in the public domain?
• Finally, look up each book on Library Thing. (You may have to create a free account on this service in order to search, but it's worth it.) Which book has been read by more users of this social networking service? Which book seems to match best with other books that you think you might like?
• Decide which book you want to read at this point.
• Now do a search of your chosen book on two academic journal databases: ProQuest and Project Muse. What journals have reviewed your book? Who are the reviewers? What books have the reviewers themselves written? Read and then print out or otherwise save these book reviews (you will use them in your final paper).
• Create a new post on your discussion section blog that describes the candidate books you considered, the book you ended up choosing, and the process you took to choose it. Include an image of the cover (from Amazon.com) and a citation to any academic reviews you found.
• Comment on another student's chosen book. (Has anyone chosen the same book as you? If they posted their choice to the blog before you did, then you need to start over and pick a different book!)
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

Crossing the Digital Divide

Thanks guys for an awesome discussion this week in 303 and 308! And major shout outs to Ella and Will for sending me two great resources to continue our examination of the "digital divide"!

First from Ella, what the city of Madison is doing to combat the digital divide:

City works to solve achievement gap, close the ‘digital divide’

October 2nd: The Badger Herald  

Madison is looking to close the “digital divide” by providing high-speed internet to low-income residents and students of those families who cannot afford it. Ald. Scott Resnick, District 8, proposed a $100,000 amendment that passed at Tuesday’s Board of Estimates meeting that will go towards a feasibility study to provide internet throughout Madison using a high-speed Long Term Evolution network.  

The goal of the study is to find a way to create a city co-op utility that would provide wireless internet to low-income neighborhoods and families. “If you think about students in the Madison School District, there are still students who don’t have access within their homes,” Resnick said. “When they try and compete in the classroom it becomes a huge disadvantage. 

The answer of ‘you can go to the library’ is no longer a satisfactory solution,” he said. Resnick said the LTE network would be similar to getting a library Wi-Fi connection a mile and a half away at home. He has said previously that for many students in Madison, when the library closes, places like McDonald’s becomes their library.  

Resnick has focused on the digital divide since he took office in 2011. At the Board of Estimates meeting, Mayor Paul Soglin said that they are working off of national studies that show that about one-third of households do not have high-speed internet access. 

Many alders at the meeting agreed on the necessity to combat this divide. “We have to take some risk and if we’re serious about doing something about the divide in this community, if we’re serious about what’s going on in low-income households. This is one mechanism which is relatively cheap given the way we’re spending money to get some really significant outcomes, not just in terms of education, but also in terms of job opportunity,” Soglin said. 

Some alders were concerned that, if accepted, the proposed budget amendment would make the previous amendment, concerning putting in a optic fiber high-speed cable near community centers, redundant. Resnick disagreed, noting the fiber cable is still necessary for the LTE network.  

Both budget amendments are focused on closing the digital divide, providing a space at home as well as other places in the community to access high-speed internet. Resnick said the biggest benefit to providing internet would be that it would serve students as an additional tool. “Having internet access doesn’t guarantee you success in the classroom,” he said. ”It is, though, another tool that allows students to remain competitive in the classroom.”  

Now that the proposed amendment has passed, Resnick said the next steps are to start the study and begin putting together the infrastructure. The council will hire a consulting organization to help gather input, and talk to community leaders to look at how they can leverage the current fiber optic network. “We need to make sure that we’re going to close the achievement gap in Madison,” Resnick said. ”We need to work together with our partners to make sure the internet is in the homes of our students.”

And then, check out this great spoken word conversation on our digital insanity provided by Will:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s0ukQGLXQ4#t=17

If you liked this, you would check out our very own socially minded, spoken word performing arts organization on campus, First Wave. They have an awesome festival coming up on October 16th-19th where all of their poetry is inspired by the Wisconsin Race to the Top education and inequalities study from 2013. Talk about combating access to literacy with literacy! The link to their facebook page is below.

First Wave

This week in LIS 201 (week 05)

Week 05: The global network society

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

• Networks of cities

This week I will distribute a list of terms and essay questions to study which will help you prepare for our first in-class exam next week. (I will probably distribute these on our course news feed.)

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• William Lazonick, “Globalization of the ICT labour force,” in R. Mansell et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies (2007).
• Christian Sandvig, “Connection at Ewiiaapaayp Mountain,” in L. Nakamura et al. eds., Race after the Internet (2012).
• Jan A.G.M. van Dijk,"Social structure" in The Network Society(2006).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Finish the final draft of paper #1.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#7 and #8) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Turn in a printed final version of paper #1.
• Review for first midterm exam.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

No online activity this weekend. Study for your exam next week.

The dangers of automation?

Interesting review today at The Verge that relates to our lecture this week — a new book on the dangers of automation by Nicholas Carr, called The Glass Cage:

He paints a scary picture. Planes are crashing as pilots are lulled into a stupor by autopilot. Financial markets flirt with disaster as traders place too much faith in algorithms they barely understand. Doctors are acting like robots themselves as they rotely click through prompts on diagnostic and billing software. And something more ineffable is taking place, Carr worries, as automation subtly cuts us off from the world.  [...]  Carr takes a broad approach to automation, so any technological abbreviation of a task would qualify. Google’s auto-completing searches automates inquiry, Carr says, while legal software automates research, discovery, and even the drafting of contracts. CAD automates architectural sketching. Thanks to an explosion in computing power, more and more things are getting automated, and Carr worries that it’s all combining to degrade our skills and insulate us from the world. "When automation distances us from our work," Carr writes, "when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives."

Check out the review here and tell us what you think, if you have a moment.

This week in LIS 201 (week 04)

Week 04: The postindustrial service economy

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

• Depression to deindustrialization

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Isaac Asimov, “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014,” New York Times(16 August 1964).
• Thomas J. Sugrue, "'The damning mark of false prosperities': The deindustrialization of Detroit," in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996).
• Laurence Veysey, "A postmortem on Daniel Bell's postindustrialism," American Quarterly 34:1 (1982). 
• Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano [chapters 1-3] (1952).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Complete your peer reviews of your fellow students' paper #1 drafts, posted as comments on their pages of the discussion section wiki.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#5 and #6) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you'll explore the Prelinger Archives, which contains thousands fantastic vintage educational and corporate promotional films, some of which deal with information and communication technology. Many of these films are in color with sound, and most are short (15 or 20 minutes).

• Search the Prelinger Archives for the most interesting vintage film for a 21st century class on the "information society" that you can.
• Please note: Within each discussion section, every student needs to find a different film to post! This means you need to see what's already been posted in your section to avoid duplication! (Students who do this assignment earlier might have an easier time of it.)
• Post a link to your film on your discussion section blog and make an argument about why this film is useful to students of our modern information infrastructure -- what can we learn from the film you found?
• Watch at least one of your fellow students' suggested films and post a comment with your reaction.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 03)

Week 03: The electromechanical control revolution

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

• The control revolution and modernity

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• James Beniger, "The Control Revolution," in Albert H. Teich, ed.,Technology and the Future (1990).
• William Cronon, "The busy hive," in Nature's Metropolis (1991).
• Simon Head, "The rise of the reengineers," in The New Ruthless Economy (2003).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
• Post your rough draft of paper #1 to your personal wiki pages (create a separate subpage so that your peer reviewers can just "comment" at the bottom).

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#3 and #4) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Your TA will set up peer review groups ( 6 students in each) and post these on your discussion section wiki in case you forget.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you are going to explore some historical news databases.

• Pick a term relating to the modern information society  -- ” "world wide web" or "computer" or "cell phone" or "digital divide" or ... well, use your imagination. The only constraint is that you can't pick a term that one of your fellow sectionmates has used (so it is in your interest to do this assignment early!)
• Try to find the earliest journalistic use of this term in three different historical newspaper databases provided by ProQuest: the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
• Now take the same term and try to find its earliest use in three different scholarly article databases: ProQuest, Project Muse, andJStor.
• Write a brief post on your section blog about the ways in which your term was first used, and whether it still has the same meaning today.
• Visit another student's post and comment on what they found out about the term that they explored.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

The costs and benefits of sponsoring literacy learning

Here's a short analysis piece from the New York Times that illuminates some of the issues that Deborah Brandt's article from this week tried to analyze: the costs and benefits of sponsoring literacy learning, especially across communities and school districts that vary widely in their wealth and resources:

People disagree, quite strenuously, on the best curriculum for teaching children to read. But all participants in the reading wars agree on some other things: Early reading is crucial — a child who does not read proficiently by third grade will probably fall further and further behind each year. American schools are failing: two out of three fourth graders don’t read at grade level.

And they agree on something else: any reading curriculum works better if children who are struggling get the chance to work, one on one, with a tutor. [...]

The problem, of course, is that very few principals can afford it. A single teacher dedicated to individual tutoring can work effectively with a small number of children each week. How many teachers would be needed to help all struggling students? The schools where tutoring is most needed, moreover, are those that can least afford it.

Is there a cheaper substitute that’s still effective? Health care in places where resources are short benefits from task-shifting: moving jobs to the lowest-trained and lowest-paid people who can do them well. That way, the expensive professionals can concentrate on the things that only they can do.

Resources are always short in education. So it is welcome news that two recent studies show that task-shifting tutoring programs can work on a wide scale — and that scale can be achieved relatively affordably.

Check out the whole piece and tell us what you think in the comments.

Should everyone read Harry Potter?

An interesting post over at Scientific American connects to many of the print culture themes we discussed in lecture this week:

For decades it's been known that an effective means of improving negative attitudes and prejudices between differing groups of people is through intergroup contact – particularly through contact between “in-groups,” or a social group to which someone identifies, and “out-groups,” or a group they don’t identify with or perceive as threatening. Even reading short stories about friendship between in- and out-group characters is enough to improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups in children. A new study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reading the Harry Potter books in particular has similar effects, likely in part because Potter is continually in contact with stigmatized groups. The “muggles” get no respect in the wizarding world as they lack any magical ability. The “half-bloods,” or “mud-bloods” – wizards and witches descended from only one magical parent – don’t fare much better, while the Lord Voldemort character believes that power should only be held by “pure-blood” wizards. He’s Hitler in a cloak.

Check out the whole post and tell us what you think in the comments.

This week in LIS 201 (week 02)

Week 02: Print culture and literacy

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 09

• Print culture and literacy

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Deborah Brandt, "The means of production: Literacy and stratification at the twenty-first century," in Literacy in American lives (2001).
• Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, "A framework for the history of publishing and reading in the United States 1880-1940," in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4 (2009).
• Ted Striphas, "E-Books and the Digital Future," in The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control(2009).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article report, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.  An article report should briefly summarize the main argument of the article, and then pose a question or comment in response. You will also want to say a little something about the author of the article and the way people responded to it. What can you find online about the person who wrote the article? Can you find any online reaction to the article? (It probably came from a book, and you can probably find book reviews.)
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms (which will have been previewed in lecture)
• Two four-minute student speeches (#1 and #2), one on each of the readings (and two two-minute student extemporaneous responses).  Your TA will designate a classmate to record your presentations on digital video. The recording will be either emailed to you or uploaded to your discussion section wiki (which you'll be joining this weekend). After watching the recording, you must email your TA with one substantive way in which you could improve your delivery.
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Discuss tasks and strategies for writing assignment #1. (Rough draft due on wiki by start of next week's discussion.)
• Discuss the written presentation grading metric.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week you'll learn how to use your discussion section wiki:

• Please click here for a wiki tutorial
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

This week in LIS 201 (week 01)

(Each week I'll post a reminder from the syllabus of upcoming assignments and activities.)

Week 01: Introduction to four information societies

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 02

Lecture meets this week at 11am in Humanities 2650 for 75 minutes.   Students are expected to attend all lectures and to take notes. By the Friday after each in-person lecture, I'll upload a PDF version of any slides I showed in lecture to our Box site (and link the site to the lecture title). We may also experiment with lecture-capture technology to record the live lecture experience; if this works, I will provide links to those videos as well. Any student seen Facebooking, shopping, chatting, gaming, or otherwise multitasking with a distracting non-class activity in lecture will be asked to close their laptop  -- even if you are typing notes at the same time.

• Introduction to the course

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

Buy your course reader from Student Print and read the articles below. Each week, you need to have your readings completed by the time you get to discussion section, in order to be able to discuss them with your TA and fellow students. We will quiz you on selected terms from the readings as well, which will be revealed at the end of each lecture.

(Unsure how closely you should be reading these? The professor has posted two annotated examples of readings, to show what he highlights when he reads through them.)

• Greg Downey, "Introduction: Communication meanings and social purposes," in Technology and Communication in American History(2011).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

Just make sure to read through this web syllabus.

DISCUSSION SECTION MEETING

All discussion sections meet this week; consult your schedule.  Students are expected to attend all in-person discussion sections. If you are absent from section, you must email your TA within 24 hours of the missed section. If you are absent from two discussion sections in a row, you will receive a concerned email from the professor. After that we will refer your absence to the Office of the Dean of Students!

• Meet your TA and your fellow students in person! (Your TA may have you create a "table tent" to help everybody learn names.)
• Discuss the syllabus and grading.
• Your TA will assign you to specific weeks and readings for your prepared oral presentation and your written article critique. (You won't know when you'll be called upon to do your extemporaneous oral presentation.) These will all be listed on your section wiki (which you'll join next week).
• Discuss techniques for effective oral presentations.
• Discuss the oral presentation grading metric.
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

Nearly every weekend you will have online homework and writing.  This weekend, after your first section meeting, you'll learn how to use your discussion section weblog. 

• Please click here for a detailed weblog tutorial.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.